At some point in the past several years, maybe late one night—dogs whimpering in their sleep, cats snapping alert—the tectonic plates of youthful creativity in New York City shifted, and Manhattan became a suburb of Brooklyn. A show at the Brooklyn Museum of works by thirty-five local artists and collectives, “Crossing Brooklyn: Art from Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Beyond,” expatiates on a situation already patent in the borough’s galleries and hangouts, notably those in Bushwick—a funky Montparnasse four L-train stops past the tamed Montmartre of Williamsburg. If you are young and a New York artist lacking a trust fund today, you are pretty surely in Brooklyn, and Brooklyn is imbuing you.
The show’s curators, Eugenie Tsai and Rujeko Hockley, shun the abstract painting and portable sculpture that pervade the borough’s gallery scene. Properly, for a museum, they promote institution-dependent installation, performance, and conceptual work, including the “community practice” that tends to occur when artists live within walking distance of poor people. Demotic touches include an alluringly swanked-up tricycle for vending shaved-ice treats, which Miguel Luciano pedals around. Pablo Helguera, of Red Hook, has made a lovely parlor space and decorated it with art works from the museum’s collection, all dated 1899—the year that Susannah Mushatt Jones, a Brooklyn supercentenarian, was born. In a related vein, Shaun Leonardo, of Clinton Hill, contributes photographs of “Taxi Dance,” his colorful reënactment of a ten-cents-a-dance hall, with the price hiked up to two dollars and paid by women to men.
